A few years ago, I posted a reflection on Ed Catmull's book, Creativity, Inc. (with Amy Wallace). I've recently been working on a project to design workshops on creativity, so I decided to revisit the book and the post. My copy of the book is full of highlighted sections and scribbled margin notes, and it [...]

Alexander Hamilton is a man after my own heart. His life story not only makes for a great musical, it is also an object lesson in being a successful autodidact. I can totally relate to his approach to making sense of the world – which was through extensive reading and long-form writing. Despite his personal [...]

I confess to a minor (?) and highly improbable obsession with the blockbuster musical Hamilton. I don’t typically enjoy freestyle/rap music, so it’s not an obvious choice for me. (My lame attempt at a line of freestyle in the title of this post is the one and only of my lifetime.) But given that Hamilton’s [...]

This past week the subject in my emerging technologies course was Next Generation Digital Learning Environments. That term is likely to be more familiar to you if you work in a higher education environment than in a corporate one. In corporate L&D, you are probably discussing similar ideas and calling the concept learning and performance [...]

A friend and I have season tickets for the Pennsylvania Ballet, an extravagance that we dearly enjoy. We’ve also been attending the “Prelude” program, where a member of the company gives a brief talk and Q&A just prior to the performance. This past Sunday, we were thrilled that our speaker was Matthew Neenan, the Pennsylvania [...]

One of John Oliver’s comedic reports is making the rounds in my Twitter feed this week. In the Last Week Tonight video, Scientific Studies*, Oliver calls out the absurdity of headlines driven by narrow research results – and worse – by complete misinterpretations (or misreporting) of research results. It’s both funny and scary at the [...]

There has been a lot of talk lately about how academics can use social media to share their emerging research and make more direct recommendations to the practitioners who might benefit from knowing their results.* Too much important research is buried in academic journals that practitioners cannot access (and written in language that isn’t relatable), [...]

Today I engaged in a conversation with Sean Michael Morris (@slamteacher) and others in the #moocmooc stream that has prompted me to ponder the difference between instructional design and learning environment design. And thinking about that has me bouncing between my constructivist heart that tells me I can never really be sure people "meet objectives" [...]

In the coming weeks, I’m participating as I can in the latest iteration of #moocmooc which is focused on instructional design. The topic is near to my heart… I engage in instructional design for a living: as a faculty developer, adjunct faculty member, and workshop facilitator – and, in a totally meta twist, the subject [...]

An article in January's Harvard Business Review has caught my attention because it adds validity and nuance to the broader approach we want to take in supporting learning in organizations. Martin Reeves, Simon Levin, and Daichi Ueda write a nice analysis of businesses as biological ecosystems - more specifically, as complex adaptive systems. They warn [...]